Category: Children’s Features

Having defeated the monstrous threat that nearly destroyed the peculiar world, Jacob Portman is back in Florida, where his story began. Jacob begins to learn more about the dangerous legacy he’s inherited, and the truths that were part of him long before he walked into Miss Peregrine’s time loop. Now, the stakes are higher than ever as Jacob and his friends are thrust into the untamed landscape of American peculiardom – a world that none of them understand. New wonders, and dangers, await in this darkly brilliant next chapter for Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children.
An excerpt from the book below. Go on, have a read.

It’s strange, what the mind can digest and what it resists. I had just survived the most surreal summer imaginable— skipping back to bygone centuries, taming invisible monsters, falling in love with my grandfather’s time-arrested ex-girlfriend—but only now, in the unexceptional present, in suburban Florida, in the house I’d grown up in, was I finding it hard to believe my eyes.
Here was Enoch, splayed upon our beige sectional, sipping Coke from my dad’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers tumbler; here was Olive, unstrapping her lead shoes to float ceilingward and ride circles on our fan; here were Horace and Hugh in our kitchen, Horace studying the photos on the fridge door while Hugh rustled for a snack;
here was Claire, both mouths slack as she gazed at the great black monolith of our wall-mounted television; here was Millard, my mother’s decor magazines rising from the coffee table and splitting in midair as he skimmed them, the shape of his bare feet imprinted into our carpet. It was a mingling of worlds I’d imagined a thousand times but never dreamed possible. But here it was: my Before and After, colliding with the force of planets.
Millard had already tried to explain to me how it was possible they could be here, apparently safe and unafraid. The loop collapse that had nearly killed us all in Devil’s Acre had reset their internal clocks. He didn’t quite understand  why, only that they were no longer in danger of sudden catastrophic aging if they stayed too long in the present. They would get older one day at a time, just like I did, their debt of years seemingly forgiven, as if they hadn’t spent
most of the twentieth century reliving the same sunny day. It was undoubtedly a miracle—a breakthrough unprecedented in peculiar history—and yet how it had come to be was not half as amazing to me as the fact that they were here at all: that beside me stood Emma, lovely, strong Emma, her hand entwined with mine, her green eyes shining as they scanned the room in wonder. Emma, whom I’d so often dreamed about in the long, lonely weeks since my return home. She wore a sensible gray dress that fell below the knee, hard flat shoes she could run in if she had to, her sandy hair pulled back into a ponytail. Decades of being depended on had made her practical to the core, but neither the responsibility nor the weight of years she carried had managed to snuff the girlish spark that lit her so brightly from the inside. She was both hard and soft, sour and sweet, old and young. That she could contain so much was what I loved most about her. Her soul was bottomless.
“Jacob?”
She was talking to me. I tried to reply, but my head was mired in dreamy quicksand.
She waved at me, then snapped her fingers, her thumb sparking like struck flint. I startled and came back to myself.
“Hey,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Where’d you go?”
“I’m just—” I waved as if raking cobwebs from the air. “It’s good to see you, that’s all.” Completing a sentence felt like trying to gather a dozen balloons in my arms.
Her smile couldn’t mask a look of mild concern. “I know it must be awfully strange for you, all of us dropping in like this. I hope we didn’t shock you too badly.”
“No, no. Well, maybe a little.” I nodded at the room and everyone in it. Happy chaos accompanied our friends wherever they went.
“You sure I’m not dreaming?”
“Are you sure I’m not?” She took my other hand and squeezed it, and her warmth and solidness seemed to lend the world some weight. “I can’t tell you how many times, over the years, I’ve pictured myself visiting this little town.”
For a moment I was confused, but then . . . of course. My grandfather. Abe had lived here since before my dad was born; I’d seen his Florida address on letters Emma had kept. Her gaze drifted as if she were lost in a memory, and I felt an unwelcome twinge of jealousy—then was embarrassed for it. She was entitled to her past, and had every right to feel as unmoored by the collision of our worlds as I did.
Miss Peregrine blew in like a tornado. She had taken off her traveling coat to reveal a striking jacket of green tweed and riding pants, as if she’d just arrived on horseback. She crossed the room tossing out orders. “Olive, come down from there! Enoch, remove your feet from the sofa!” She hooked a finger at me and nodded toward the kitchen. “Mr. Portman, there are matters which require your attention.”
Emma took my arm and accompanied me, for which I was grateful; the room had not quite stopped spinning.
“Off to snog each other already?” said Enoch. “We only just arrived!”
Emma’s free hand darted out to singe the top of his hair. Enoch recoiled and slapped at his smoking head, and the laugh that burst out of me seemed to clear some of the cobwebs from my head.
Yes, my friends were real and they were here. Not only that, Miss Peregrine had said they were going to stay awhile. Learn about the modern world a bit. Have a holiday, a well-earned respite from the squalor of Devil’s Acre—which, with their proud old house on Cairnholm gone, had become their temporary home. Of course they were welcome, and I was inexpressibly grateful to have them here. But how would this work, exactly? What about my parents and uncles, who at this very moment Bronwyn was guarding in the garage? It was too much to grapple with all at once, so for the moment I shoved it aside.

In A Map of Days, the stakes are higher than ever as Jacob and his friends are thrust into the untamed landscape of American peculiardom—a world with few ymbrynes, or rules—that none of them understand.

With lush and atmospheric art of Rovina Cai woven in throughout, “And The Ocean Was Our Sky” by Patrick Ness turns the familiar tale of “Moby Dick” upside down and tells a story all its own with epic triumph and devastating fate.
But where did the idea for And The Ocean Was Our Sky come from? Here is an excerpt from the introduction of the book by Patrick Ness, where he tells us just that. Take a look!

And The Ocean Was Our Sky started with a simple question, and then got weirder from there. I was thinking one day, “What if Moby Dick was told by the whale?” I’m always fascinated by who tells a story and how that changes it. A good example is a story like Wicked, where the Wicked Witch of the West has an entirely different take on Oz. I love that. Imagine if cats got to write all the books about what dogs are like.
But then the idea kept growing. What if whales hunted men like men hunted whales? What if there was a world where they both did that at the same time? What legends would arise? Most interestingly, how strange and compelling to look through the eyes of a main character who, at the start at least, views us as little more than prey.
Which spawned the character of Bathsheba, our narrator. Young, but tough. Moreover, a strikingly different kind of intellect and emotions than a human might have. I’m Scandinavian, and the stereotype about us is our stoicism. I’ve argued for years that stoicism doesn’t mean unemotional; it means privately emotional. And that’s what a whale felt like to me. There are deep, deep feelings in her, as deep as the sea. What happens when they get close to the surface?
And then the illustrations! Good God. I can barely draw a stick figure, and the beauty and breadth and drama that Rovina Cai has brought to this book – in much the same way the genius Jim Kay did on A Monster Calls – are astonishing to me as things I could never have thought of. She took the story to a whole new level. Bathsheba is alive and on the page. Facing her demons.
Because to my surprise, this became in the end a story of the devils we chase, the devils we hunt, the devils we perhaps create. And our need for constant vigilance over those very devils who would seek power over all of us. It became a very contemporary story of the power of rumour, the power that words have to change and sometimes even make reality. And not always in a good way.
And so here are the first couple of chapters of the story of my brave and powerful Bathsheba, coming to understand the scope of the world, hoping that she’s not too late…
All best,
Patrick Ness
March 2018